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Expanded from his
short story, “My Little Brother Is a Monster,” Bruce Coville’s Always October is a little thinner in
plot than his best books but still contains plenty of fun and humor in the
combination that his fans have come to know and enjoy. This is Coville’s 100th
book, and he is nothing if not consistent (as well as, obviously, prolific). The story involves a baby left on the doorstep
for Jake Doolittle and his mother to find; his mother’s decision to keep the
child, identified by a note as Little Dumpling and thereafter called LD by her
and Jake; and a discovery that would be unsettling in a book by anyone other
than Coville: “In the crib where LD should have been, wearing the same yellow
duckie pajamas he had gone to sleep in, lay a creature with bright green fur,
the beginnings of a snout, and enormous pointed ears that curved over his
head.” LD, it seems, is an LM…little monster. But never mind – he is still Jake’s
brother, after all (in Coville, this sort of thing makes sense). Well, enter
some other elements, notably including Jake’s friend, “Weird Lily” Carker, who
hangs out with Jake in the local cemetery and won’t tell anyone about LD
because she has a secret of her own, which involves the fact that she is living
with her grandfather instead of in the foster home where she is supposed to be.
And then there is Always October, which is not only the title of the book but
also the name of a fantasy land created by Jake’s grandfather in a series of
stories that are “weird and scary” and that Jake and Lily find they must enter
to help protect LD and maybe, oh, save the world.The whole plot is bizarre and outlandish
enough to pull young readers in and keep them intrigued, and the alternating
narrations by Jake and Lily do a good job of providing somewhat different
perspectives on events.The actual
writing is the same throughout, though: the two protagonists are not
particularly well differentiated.The
monsters in the land of Always October, however, are differentiated, with some good and some bad and some just ridiculous.The book eventually turns on a Jewish concept
called tikkun olam, which Jake points
out means “repairing the world” and which his mother tries to live by “even
though we’re Methodist, not Jewish.”By
the time Coville gets to the epilogues – yes, there are two – all sorts of
mysteries and transformations have occurred and everything has been put
together neatly, as Coville usually does, including the fates of Keegel Farzym,
Sploot Fah and various other oddly or aptly named characters.

There are characters
galore in Scary School 2: Monsters on the
March, which is also a combination of the slightly weird and scary with the
amusing – and, also like Coville’s book, is for ages 8-12. The school is one
where the teachers have a bad habit of eating the students and the students are
mostly ghosts, ghouls or goblins anyway, so it doesn’t much matter.The storyteller is 11-year-old Derek the
Ghost – or, well, 11-years-old-when-he-died-in-a-science-experiment-gone-wrong
Derek the Ghost.In this second book in
the series, the students of Scary School are about to collect their reward for
winning the Ghoul Games: a trip to Monster Forest to meet the Monster King,
King Zog. The Monster Forest is, well, a forest full of monsters: bearodactyls,
fearsome pirates, a toad-faced princess, that sort of thing. The problem is
that Princess Zogette falls for Charles Nukid and follows him back to Scary
School, leading King Zog and Captain Pigbeard (Zogette's fiancé) to declare war
on the school. In addition to Charles (the new kid at the school; hence his
name), some characters from the first book who return are Penny the Possum,
Principal Headcrusher, and Frank whose name is pronounced "Rachel.”And there are such new characters as Mr.
Grump, the elephant-man teacher; Ms. Hydra, the seven-headed hall monitor; and
Tanya Tarantula, a new student who is, yes, a giant spider. As in the first
book, Scott M. Fischer’s art contributes a great deal to the amusement: his
drawings of the characters make them funny, strange and just a little bit
scary, which is also a pretty good description of the narrative.

One more
light-and-slightly-scary book, for slightly younger readers (ages 7-10): Emily
Jenkins’ Invisible Inkling: Dangerous
Pumpkins. This one is set at Halloween, which fourth-grader Hank Wolowitz
dreads because his big sister, Nadia, always manages to scare him. But maybe
not this year, thanks to the invisible bandapat (that would be Invisible
Inkling) living in Hank’s laundry basket. Now, it happens that Inkling loves
pumpkins – not to look at but to eat – so he just adores Halloween. This is a
problem for Hank, who really does not want Inkling eating all the pumpkins in
Brooklyn. Hank also has to come up with a good costume and maybe get revenge on
Nadia. As for Inkling: “Sometimes, it doesn’t matter that I can speak Yiddish
and Mandarin – or that I’ve traveled the globe,” he explains. “It doesn’t
matter that you humans have art projects and clean apartments. Sometimes,
everything else in the world disappears but me and a pumpkin.”That clears it all up, right?Anyway, eventually there is a climactic scene
in an elevator, with Inkling playing the part of a ghost and Hank figuring out
a way to get Inkling more pumpkins while also learning that Nadia really cares
about him…but at the same time getting revenge on her for all the scares of
previous years. And so everybody learns something about family and pumpkins and
even about ice cream, thanks to a Halloween-themed flavor called “loose
tooth.”The book, a sequel to Invisible Inkling, does not make a whole
lot of sense, but Jenkins tells the story with relish (well, not relish…ice
cream…but you get the idea); and Harry Bliss provides illustrations that
capture the characters’ personalities (including Inkling’s) quite nicely. Much
sillier than it is frightening, Invisible
Inkling: Dangerous Pumpkins will be more fun for readers of the first book
than for ones who have not met Hank and Inkling before, although there is
enough amusement here to please even people meeting this duo for the first
time.